Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

A pair of French teachers followed for two years the actors of the resurgence of French in Louisiana: teachers, activists, politicians, students and parents of students. Their documentary, The Choice of Theo , will premiere in Lafayette, Louisiana on January 26.

Theodore Brode is one of the few French teachers from Louisiana. He is part of this generation of Louisians who discovered French in Canada. His ancestors were Francophones, of Acadian and Creole descent, but the 28-year-old grew up speaking English, a consequence of the law that banned French in Louisiana for nearly forty years.

There’s one last group of courts for us to look at to conclude this series on law-keeping in the fourteenth century. These are the church, or ecclesiastical, courts. They were a cause of bad feeling between many monarchs and archbishops of Canterbury. The kings felt that the church courts encroached too much into non-church matters, while the church wanted to spread their influence over the lives of ordinary parishioners.

The church had the right to try clerics in their own courts. They were governed by canon law, not the law of the kingdom. Each diocese had two main kinds of court: the consistory, which covered the whole diocese and was presided over by the bishop, and the archdeaconry court, which only covered an archdeaconry and was presided over by the archdeacon.

As well as trying clerics, the courts also covered lay people where the issue between them was a moral one…